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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (112239)	5/29/2009 9:56:44 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541763

The exclusion of homosexual partnerships from marriage laws resulted from disdain for the excluded class of people. It happened with disdain, but I don't think it was a direct result of the disdain. It wasn't "we hate the homosexuals so lets not let them marry each other", it was based on the thinking of marriage such that a homosexual marriage would be a contradiction in therms like dry water, and on the fact that marriage was considered connected to the idea of having kids and homosexuals can't have each other's kids (at least not yet, and certainly not at the time when the traditional understanding of marriage arose). And even if "we hate the homosexuals so lets not let them marry each other" had been the motivation, it still wouldn't change the point that you would have a situation where a probably or mostly immutable difference causes the identical treatment to impact them differently. It would just be that no effort was made to eliminate this different impact because of the disdain for the class of people impacted. To bring back a previous analogy if a law outlawing begging was passed because of disdain for the poor, it still wouldn't be different treatment under the law as long as the non-poor where also forbidden. (And yes I know being poor isn't immutable, so the analogy isn't perfect, but apparently I put less stress on immutability than you do, and this application of the analogy address the disdain issue not immutability.)